Puppy Squeeze started as an attempt to revive dpup by gposil, a long time ago. It was developed by a team of Puppy community members, notably dejan555, Stripe, stu90, tubeguy, DaveS, afgs, 01micko, Lobster, James C, ttuuxxx, Billtoo, Iguleder and others.

Dpup is basically a traditional Puppy, built from Debian packages from its “stable” branch. Its key advantages are stability and conservativeness, which result in slow release cycles and solid releases.

The last attempt to build a release-quality dpup was Puppy Squeeze, which died on late 2010 due to problems with the Debian packages, which were somewhere between beta and release-candidate quality. It had a very big following in the Puppy community and its last builds were quite good, actually; SneekyLinux even made a very positive review.

Puppy Squeeze was followed by Insidious Puppy, an almost identical Puppy build, which was built from Debian's experimental branch instead of the "stable" one, as a potential direction towards the first stable release of dpup. I hoped the different packages will make it easier to maintain and further develop dpup, but I was wrong. It wasn't preceived well; SneekyLinux' [ulr=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSFJpzyOVcI]review[/url] explains why. The experimental packages proved to be quite stable, but development died off quickly due to lack of motivation and the small interest of people in such a "hybrid" puplet.

But now everything has changed - dpup is back into business, with dejan555's dpup-485 and Barry's experimental dpup build. Debian Squeeze is finally released (and has two update versions already) and Woof works perfectly, so I guess it's about time to build another dpup!

The Idea

My idea is simple: revive dpup as a pet project (no pun intended), but with great minimalism and the conservative approach that made Puppy Squeeze popular. I think it could be a very good base for puplets.

The main agenda is: no fancy features, just Puppy the way it used to be until the wonderful 5.x branch. Panels, widgets, artwork, etc' are extra; I want to make a good base Puppy that can be used both as a base for puplet development and as a standard, standalone Puppy release for users who appreciate minimalism.

Dpup has many advantages over Ubuntu-based Puppy builds; notably lower memory footprint, easy development, long-term support and great compatibility with the 5.x series. I believe it deserves a second chance.

Puppy Squeeze 4.9.9.1 Alpha 2

Here's the second alpha: a complete Puppy Squeeze build with all applications, including office applications and a video player. I started working on it as the base for Enlightened Dpup, but decided to fork it to resemble Puppy Squeeze.

I can't promise I'm going to maintain this thing. At the moment, it's fun and it looks good, so my motivation is high. I lead a very busy lifestyle, so there is a chance this thing will be abandoned.

Anyway, back to Puppy stuff.

The first builds had no applications at all: the only things that came with it were ROX-Filer, JWM and the free space tray icon. I added many packages; all of them were built automatically (using Puppizard), but packaged manually with post-installation script to ensure integration with ROX-Filer and Puppy stuff.

This somewhere-between-alpha-and-beta-quality build features the following:

- The kernel is 2.6.39.3, patched with BFS (which improves performance dramatically). Very fast here.
- Volumeicon and Aumix instead of Retrovol: the latter consumes much RAM , while most of the time, all you need is a quick way to adjust the master volume. Volumeicon provides you with a slider that controls the Master channel and a menu entry that launches Aumix as an external mixer, when you need more advanced and fine-grained functionality. This combination is much more RAM-wise.
- Xarchiver replaces the ancient Xarchive and I patched it with Slackware's patch to support XZ compression. It's more modern, faster and has pretty much the same interface, so there's no need to adjust to it. I also added a backwards-compatibility symlink so it does not break old stuff that use Xarchive.
- Aterm replaces rxvt-unicode: it's half the size, but supports more advanced features such as transparency. As I did with Xarchive, this one has backwards-compatibility symlinks, so stuff that depend on rxvt or rxvt-unicode should work perfectly.
- gHasher replaces GtkHash; it doesn't have any extra dependencies and it's much smaller.
- DeaDBeeF replaces Pmusic as the default audio player; it's much, much faster. Pmusic is very sluggish on netbooks; it takes 5 to 10 seconds to make its main window appear after I minimize it, not to mention how slow it is when I add my music folder to the playlist.
- Zathura replaces ePDFViewer; it's the smallest PDF viewer out there and it's simply perfect for small screens.
- Leafpad replaces Geany as the default text viewer, while Geany is the default text editor. The former is very lightweight, while the latter takes a second or two to start on slow hardware.
- Parcellite replaces glipper, because the latter is simply ancient and I'm pretty sure nobody uses it.
- Xdg-user-dirs and xdg-utils are included, to improve desktop integration. A good example for this is the website link in the “about” dialog of most GTK programs – these links should work when xdg-utils is present. Also, the “Videos”, “Music”, “Pictures”, etc' directories appear in your home folder thanks to xdg-user-dirs. It's something nice to have.
- Opera is the default browser; it's much faster and smaller than competing browsers.
- Transmission 1.x is the default BitTorrent client, since Pctorrent doesn't work at all. The 2.x series is much heavier: try to launch Transmission and see how snappy it is.
- Fotoxx replace gtkam; the latter allows easy extraction of photos, but Fotoxx is a great tool for organizing photo albums. This replacement isn't perfect, but I still think it's a good idea. Geeqie is the best alternative, but it's a combination of a photo viewer and a regular image viewer, so it's a waste of RAM and precious time if all you want is an image preview … one application (and not half an application) for each task, remember?
- LXTask replaces Pprocess; Pprocess is very heavy and I think it's kinda ironic that you launch such a heavy and sluggish process just to kill a process that makes your computer hang or leaks memory. It's a classic chicken and egg case.
- LXAppearance replaces gtk-chtheme, since it has more options and allows the user to switch the icon theme, cursor theme and other stuff. It's nice to have.
- Findwild replaces Searchmonkey; it's a lightweight wildcard search tool.
- gRun replaces gExec; the latter has a “run as root” checkbox (useless, isn't it?) and it's simply ancient. Also, gRun has a nice auto-completion feature.
- Galculator replaces the traditional calculator hell.
- XChat is the default IRC client, Viewnior is the image viewer, mtPaint is the image editor, Sylpheed is the e-mail client, Uget is the download manager, gFTP is the FTP client … in short: many traditional applications are there just because they're the best choice.
- GNOME MPlayer and MPlayer2 are the multimedia backend.
- Everybody likes stellar simulation software and fractals, that's why Galaxy and Xaos are included.
- The artwork from Puppy Squeeze and the 23oz GTK theme are the default. As a “plan B”, it also bundles the artwork from Teh Gray Puppy (my spup derivative, including the wonderful Trinity icons). These make it very elegant

Differences from Lucid Puppy:

- Built from a 100% vanilla Woof, except two symlinks I had to add manually to fix the devx (/usr/bin/automake and /usr/bin/aclocal), a different /root/.gtkrc-2.0 that works with LXAppearance, a small fix required to be able to exit E17 and a small fix for Debian's CUPS. I don't want to stress check Woof's abilities, I want to build a Puppy and contribute all the fixes I find back to the upstream Woof, so the whole Puppy community benefits from them.
- It has its own repository which contains all the packages built specifically for it, that's Packages-puppy-dpup-official. It contains all the packages I built for it; I'm against stuffing package entries in other repositories so Woof picks them up – that's a dirty hack that makes it very hard (or impossible) for puplet developers to rebuild puplets using Woof.
- I do my best not to mix Debian and Puppy libraries. For example, Puppy Squeeze uses the Debian dbus, for better compatibility with desktop applications that rely on it. The use of Puppy libraries makes it impossible to install Debian packages that link against the equivalent Debian libraries, due to version incompatibility issues.
- Strong identitity and branding, right from the start. That's one of the major reasons it became so popular. Puppy Squeeze had a wallpaper with its logo (Tubeguy's wonderful wallpaper!) and its own logo (afgs' awesome logo) in the help pages. This tradition continues with the new Puppy Squeeze.
- Mesa DRI (Xorg_High) stuff are built-in; no need to install extra packages that waste save file space to enjoy some 3D goodness. This is great for ATI and Intel hardware.
- More emphasis on size and low RAM usage, but without compromising completeness and usability.

Innovations and cool stuff:

- Puppy Squeeze includes Dash, a lightweight, POSIX-compliant shell which makes shell scripts much faster (and lighter!). I notice a big boost in speed, especially with scripts that rely on gtkdialog/Yad/Zenity/whatever and Puppizard. Dash is about 50-70 KB, while Bash is almost 1 MB; all this bloat is loaded and relocated each time you run it, while wasting precious RAM and priceless time, even for the simplest scripts.
- Yad is included, as in many recent puplets. This makes the new generation of GUI shell scripts work out of the box.
- Puppizard is included in the devx, along with the strippkg script (the ultimate package stripping script I wrote long ago) and a friendly ncurses-based interface that hides all the ugly details and lets you build a package in two clicks. It's the first Puppy that features packages built by it; all the binary packages in the repository were built automatically. I still need to write some repository mechanism for Puppizard, so the latest build scripts can be downloaded automatically too.
- Ppoweroff, a shutdown dialog I wrote for problematic window managers such as Enlightment. It is written using Yad runs through Dash.
- Xdg-utils and xdg-user-dirs, for better compatibility with big desktop applications meant to be used with desktop environments.
- Modernization and reduced RAM usage, through lighter applications such as Aterm, gRun, DeaDBeeF, Parcellite and Volumeicon.
- Since I want it to be a good base for puplets, it's E17-ready and Xfce-ready out of the box. I want to build E17 as an “official” add-on that acts as a “delta” from a plain dpup and a Macpup-like puplet.
- MPlayer2 instead of MPlayer, with ffmpeg statically linked into it, to reduce memory consumption and size. Works great for me, it consumes 10-20 MB of RAM and I can drag the window across the screen without any tearing effect, under my netbook.
- XZ compression with thex86 BCJ filter. Makes it really tiny!

New in alpha 2:

- Abiword and Gnumeric
- MPlayer2 and GNOME MPlayer
- E17, fresh SVN snapshot from yesterday, along with nice settings and a Puppy profile
- A fix for the CUPS authentication failure issue
- New kernel, 2.6.39.3, with XZ-compressed Squashfs images and many drivers not included in other packages of this kernel version
- Menu icons issue fixed
- Xfce's GTK theme engine
- Fixed AdvanceCOMP, OptiPNG and Puppizard in the devx
- ntfs-3g is now included
- LXAppearance upgraded from 0.5.0 to 0.5.1
- Tons of stuff were added (I think they consume 15-20 MB), but the ISO size actually dropped by 2 MB
- Looks much better than the first alpha, feels pretty much like a Lucid Puppy beta

ISO: squeeze-4.9.9.1-SCSI.iso (99 MB)
devx: devx_squeeze_4.9.9.1.sfs (95 MB)
MD5: md5sums.txt
Suggestion: download using wget or cURL, so you can resume broken downloads.
Note: I attached (see the bottom of this post) all the required files to build your very own Puppy Squeeze. Just download a fresh Woof (see Barry's blog for instructions) and put the files in the "squeeze" directory there.

Known issues:

- The help page won't open, because BaCon is missing. It's easy to fix. I thought it was Opera's fault, but I was wrong ... Barry's new first-boot screen is written using BaCon and links against a library from it.
- E17's Bluetooth module won't load, I just need to recompile it I guess. Nothing serious. I want to do another E17 snapshot next week.
- In order to install Flash, you'll need a couple of libraries from Firefox or Seamonkey. Lucid Puppy solves this problem by including those in the ISO; you can get them from the official binary package Mozilla supplies or from any PET.
- This isn't an issue, but Enlightment is the default desktop. If you want to use JWM, just boot with pfix=nox and put "jwm" in /etc/windowmanager; you'll get the traditional Puppy Squeeze desktop.
- Sysprof and NDISwrapper are not included, I'll build those when the kernel package meets my high quality criteria

Hi Iguleder
I take it that Squeeze is based on Barry's last Dpup release about 2 or so months back, If So did you figure out the devx? It wasn't so stable, and had issues compiling ffmpeg, at the time I managed to compile ffmpeg but it took a lot of work to do so.
Great job on the replacement apps, Most of those changes I usually do myself, nice to see others doing so also
As a music player goes DeaDBeeF was very large last time I compiled it, how large was the package you used?
also you stated "it lacks office applications and a video player." is that because of the devx or because you not including them or just to keep the size down. Really without a video player and word processor it does limit the usefulness out of the box. I use the Video player usually around 1000 to 1 word processor Can't say I even used abiword once this year, lol but others of course do use it daily, did you also remove Gnumeric, I've never used it yet, lol
I guess I should download it since I really like Debian puppy version way better than Ubuntu versions.
Thanks
ttuuxxx_________________http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games

hi, did frugal manual install to ext4 hdd. no support for my troublesome broadcom wl.ko driver. alternate ar9170usb recognized, configured, and connected after reboot. the os is very fast and with opera more so.

I think you'll need a later kernel for this one. Not a problem, it's very easy to rebuild Squeeze with a new kernel since it uses a vanilla Woof.

Regarding the multimedia front, I'm trying to build a static mplayer2 at the moment, with ffmpeg compiled into it. Should be much smaller than a normal ffmpeg/mplayer combo.

EDIT: E17 is availablehere, but there's another small tweak required to get it working properly. I forgot to disable the Rox pinboard for E17 in /root/.xinitrc._________________My homepageMy GitHub profile

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